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20 years on from Vancouver: reviewing the 'HIV Treatment Era' in the UK

Dates
Thursday, October 6, 2016 - 09:00 to 17:00
Location
The Open University Camden, 1-11 Hawley Crescent, London NW1 8NP

Reviewing social science research conducted during the ‘HIV Treatment Era’ in the UK

Registration for our 1 day symposium is now open!

In 1996, at the 11th international conference on AIDS in Vancouver, trials of new ‘combination’ pharmaceutical HIV treatments reported remarkable effectiveness in delaying disease progression. Implementation of these treatments in the global north was accompanied by dramatic accounts of ‘Lazarus-like’ recoveries and the emptying out of acute HIV wards. Vancouver 1996 ushered in a ‘treatment-era’, which transformed HIV from a short almost invariably fatal condition to a chronic treatable condition. The treatment era (roughly 1996 to 2011, when pharmaceutical prevention technologies were developed) transformed not only the experience of living with HIV but also how HIV is perceived, imagined and represented.  In the UK, a major body of government-funded applied social science research was conducted during this period, which responded to questions around treatment access, adherence and the impact of treatments on sexual risk.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the Vancouver conference, this symposium will consider what this work can tell us about transformations wrought by the treatment era; and in particular, topics of concern to medical sociology, such as biomedical subjectivities and identities, sexuality intimacy and risk and social/political organising around health and illness.

The symposium will bring together three groups: (a) the researchers who produced this research, (b) people with HIV who lived through this period and (c) a new generation of researchers working in this area. By uniting (or reuniting) those who were the ‘subject’ or ‘object’ of the research with those who produced it we can consider questions of authorship/authority and re-cast the research and its findings as artefacts for sociological enquiry. Moreover, by enabling a new generation of researchers to critically reflect on the research, we can also consider questions of the influence, continuity and future research agendas.

The symposium is free and open to anyone with an interest in the study of social aspects of HIV, but we particularly encourage those at an early stage of their research in this area either in academic and/or applied or community settings. To that end, there are 5 travel bursaries of £50 each available to post-graduate students or researchers on low incomes. A draft programme for the day can be found here

If you wish to be considered for a travel bursary, please email a short paragraph (150 word max) stating your current circumstances and saying how attending the seminar will help your research or studies to Dr Peter Keogh at peter.keogh@open.ac.uk by no later than 5pm Thursday 15th September.

To register for this event, please email hsc-re-events@open.ac.uk.  Registration closes 26th September 2016.